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Posts tagged ‘kitchen’

As I detailed in my previous post, my beloved little dishwasher burst into flames and was beyond repair. It was time to buy a new one.

Dishwashers have changed in 13 years. They’ve got new-fangled ways of drying dishes (“condensation drying”), new finishes like stainless steel and a shiny version of battleship gray, fancy touchscreen displays, and displays that are hidden when the dishwasher is closed to give a nice clean look (marred only by the large logo badge on the bottom).

This is what it feels like to load the bottom rack in a tall tub dishwasher!

So perhaps the newest feature that is abundantly available on all of them are “tall tubs,” meaning that the taller tubs allow for more room on the top rack to place tall mugs and even plates. It does seem quite seductive to be able to put serving bowls and plates on the top rack, though I really never needed to do that with my old machine.

But have you noticed that almost every retailer displays the dishwashers on a 6” platform? Sure, it makes it easier to peer into them to see all those fancy feature. One of the problems with the tall tubs is that when the door is open, the lower rack is much, much closer to the floor. Elevating the dishwasher makes it seem to be the same height as the old dishwasher, hiding the fact that you’ll now be doing hamstring stretches and toe touches for every plate and utensil you put into the bottom rack.

Sometimes there are sagas so incredulous, you just can’t make this stuff up. The saga of my dishwasher is one of them.

It starts with how the dishwasher died.

I loved my little Maytag dishwasher. What a workhorse! When we got it 13 years ago, it was a fully featured, water saving marvel. It had a countdown timer, a pot scrubber option, fully adjustable racks, and a delay start. It was much less noisy than its predecessor, a nondescript machine that failed shortly after we moved into the house. While the shiny, new Maytag was quieter, it still was noisy enough that I used the delay start feature. If I was wide awake at 2am, the gentle sounds of the dishwasher could lull me back to sleep (despite the fact that my bedroom is on the floor above and on the other end of the house).